There are multiple dimensions to understanding how first-year undergraduate women come to know and experience engineering, grounded primarily in the fact that women, and even more-so women of Color, 1 are underrepresented. The number of engineering degrees conferred to women nearly doubled from 2011 to 2020, but women still account for just 24% of bachelor's degrees in engineering (National Science Board, National Science Foundation, 2022). For women of Color, the statistics are even more dismal, with fewer than 4% of engineering degrees awarded to Black, Latinx, and Indigenous women combined (American Society for Engineering Education, 2016). In addition, degree attainment for women in engineering lags advances made in almost all other STEM disciplines (Sax & Newhouse, 2018). 1 The phrase "of Color" is often used ambiguously. This does not honor the unique racial or ethnic experiences of individuals who are not white. We use the term "women of Color'' to highlight the range of identities reported by those in our sample and these identities include Black, Latinx, Asian, bi-or multi-racial and Middle Eastern. We utilize this phrase to underscore the instances of marginalization that participants of Color reported regularly enduring in engineering contexts (Basile et al., 2022). We intentionally capitalize the word Color as an act of resistance against the culture of white hegemony often experienced within higher education. We recognize that women of Color are not a monolithic group and value studies that address the nuances in their experiences we are not able to study here.
The persistence of these disparities reflects historical discrimination and socialization. For example, STEM classrooms have been consistently identified as sites of microaggressions against women and people of Color that are related to stereotype threat and isolation (Carter et al., 2019). These hostile environments contribute to disparities in academic achievement outcomes by gender and race and ethnicity. In fact, women often experience hostile climates, self-doubt, and stereotype threat during their transition into engineering, despite growing competition in high school preparation courses and higher achievement in that environment (MacPhee et al., 2013). These early impressions potentially dampen what could be an empowering experience for women as they begin college, even in an academically challenging engineering atmosphere. They also come on top of transition experiences that all students more generally face early on during college, such as identifying and building social relationships, acclimating to college level academics, shifts to course delivery and format, and managing homesickness (Woosley, 2003).
This qualitative study focused on the experiences, interactions, and engagements of undergraduate women during their first few weeks of college to better understand how these early experiences inform the ways that women position themselves in engineering. Understanding these initial college experiences and addressing issues that arise during this period is critical because research has found a correlation between these initial experiences and students' subsequent experiences and both short-term (Clark, 2005;Woosley, 2003) and long-term (Allen et al., 2008) outcomes. We addressed these questions in our study: "What do undergraduate women experience in their first few weeks of college as engineers?" and "How do undergraduate women's initial college experiences inform how they position themselves in engineering?"
In addressing what our participants described and understood of their early experiences, we uncovered that their self-understanding was inherently intertwined with how they made calculated moves based on contradictory messaging about women's competence and suitability for engineering, both prior to and early on in their college experience, as well as expectations that women adopt feminine or other stereotypical roles that are not associated with success in engineering. Entrenched gender expectations in engineering intensified and reified these contradictory messages during their early college experiences and left these women questioning their competence and suitability for engineering. For women of Color, the whiteness of the space uniquely heightened, differentiated, and situated their experiences. In this study we reveal and foretell the complicated journey women take in engineering, an environment in which they are less likely to complete an engineering degree, even with comparable achievement (Lord et al., 2014). They are also less likely to enter the engineering profession, even if they earn an engineering degree (Fouad et al., 2017;Ong et al., 2020;Ross et al., 2021).
As Mertz and Anfara (2015) discuss, "Frameworks offer the ability to help researchers (1) organize and focus a study, (2) reveal and conceal meaning and understanding, (3) situate the research in a scholarly conversation and provide a vernacular, and (4) reveal its strengths and weaknesses" (p. 231).
To accomplish these goals, we utilized the concept double bind and situated our study in intersectionality. We begin with a discussion of the term double bind and its meaning and then proceed to frame this study through intersectionality. Malcom and colleagues (1976) were the first to use the term double-bind in the STEM research literature. This early work was based on the experiences shared by a diverse group of 30 women participating in the Conference of Minority Women Scientists. Malcom et al. (1976) brought in the term to understand the double bound intersectional experiences of women of Color in STEM with racialized and gendered oppression. 2 As noted in this seminal study, women of Color "have traditionally been excluded because of biases related to both their race or ethnicity and gender, constituting a double bind" (Malcom et al., 1976, p. 1). A double bind exists when a person receives and is confronted by conflicting messages of which none allow for a desirable response or outcome. 3 Consistent with this definition, we used the term to convey the ways in which women get caught in a network of entangled, often contradictory, messages and social expectations that lead them to feel more visible, more vulnerable, and potentially impact their ability to fully participate in engineering. A classic example of a double bind is that a woman, to succeed, must emulate masculine traits of power while also performing traditionally feminine roles (Eagly & Carli, 2007;Hart, 2016;Park & Park-Ozee, 2020;Phelan et al., 2008). In this study, the term provided an organizing vernacular through which to unpack, understand, and make explicit the underlying meanings in the experiences that our participants shared. Crenshaw (1989), in her seminal work on intersectionality, posited that social identities shape individual perspectives such that belonging to more than one minoritized community creates a distinct experience of oppression. For women of Color, Essed (1991) described this distinct oppression phenomenon as gendered racism. As both a concept and a method, intersectionality is used to examine the experiences of people at the intersections of their identities. As Museus and Saelua (2014) discussed, intersectionality calls us to acknowledge and address how "more complex understandings of systems of oppression intersect to shape the experience of people in higher education" (p. 69). An intersectional approach requires examining how broader systems of oppression operate and interact with one's identity categories (Jones et al., 2022). Crenshaw (1991) identified three types of intersectionality: representational, structural, and political. In this study, we focused on two. Representational intersectionality reflects how dominant narratives function in images to subordinate those with intersectional minoritized identities, problematically influencing how people with majoritized identities respond to and interact with those who hold intersectional minoritized identities. For example, men engineers treating women engineers as secretaries (Hart, 2016;Park & Park-Ozee, 2020), and women of Color regulating and monitoring their appearance and interactions to avoid fulfilling oppressive hegemonic scripts related to their representation (Charleston et al., 2014). This can lead to women's undoing of their gender in engineering (Powell et al., 2009) which ultimately harms them as individuals and as a group (see "Gendered Experiences in Engineering" in Review of the Literature). Structural intersectionality provides language to understand the qualitatively distinct experiences of people with intersecting oppressed identities. For example, women of Color experience regular instances of racial prejudice and discrimination in existing in engineering spaces like classrooms and the isolation of "being the only one" with their social identities in these spaces (Malone & Barabino, 2009;Stitt & Happel-Parkins, 2019;True-Funk et al., 2021). West and Fenstermaker's (1995) work on "doing difference" demonstrated how people experience identities such as gender and race simultaneously and the ways that the salience of these identities and the experience of them can vary across interactions. For example, in certain contexts, women may stress the presentation of their gender, while in others, racial or ethnic identity, might dominate. Intersectionality scholarship has recently begun to explore how those with both privileged and minoritized identities, such as white women in engineering, experience their identities (Goodman, 2014). In this study, we used intersectionality to understand women's early experiences in engineering and how those experiences represent a double bind that complicates how they understand themselves as engineers. Intersectionality helped us to unpack implicit and explicit meaning making, particularly for our women of Color participants.
In this review, we focus on both literature in STEM broadly and in engineering specifically. As Perez-Felkner (2018) noted: there are times when the generality of STEM applies in unpacking the literature, and there are contexts where the specificity of engineering and its varying disciplines are better able to contextualize women's experiences.
The development of science as a discipline is historically intertwined with systems of power and oppression. This ranges from creating a scientific basis for racial oppression in craniometry and eugenics, to the foundational role of masculinized knowledge structures and the valorization of meritocracy in scientific disciplines (Carter et al., 2019). Meritocratic admissions systems operate under an assumption of equality of opportunity and promote the necessity of competition evident in discourse about the selectivity of engineering programs, weed-out classes, and certain students being academically underprepared for engineering (Blair-Loy & Cech, 2022;Carter et al., 2019;Secules, 2019). Miller et al. (2021) identified that the cisnormative, heteropatriarchal, and hypermasculine behaviors of men create a pervasive perception of a dude culture in STEM. Kuchynka et al. (2018) identified "benevolent sexism, " including paternalism and complementary gender differentiation, as particularly common in STEM environments. This culture contributes to minoritized students feeling marginalized, invisible, or pressured to blend into spaces inside and outside the classroom. Engineering has been depicted as an objective and "identity-blind" discipline that focuses on practical problems yet people with a limited number of identities dominate. White middle-class educated men have been overrepresented since the early 19th century origins of engineering as a professionalized occupation, positioning the engineering identity as a white, masculine, middle-class endeavor (Carter et al., 2019;Pawley, 2019;Rohde et al., 2020).
Researchers began addressing the complex barriers that women of Color face in STEM in the 1970s. Malcom et al. (1976) identified trending disparities for women of Color in access to pre-college preparation, financial and educational resources to attain acceptance into STEM programs, social and educational support during college, and professional status once in the field. Many of these disparities have persisted and continue to impact women of Color (McGee, 2020;Ong et al., 2020;Robinson et al., 2016), subverting the assumption of an equal opportunity meritocracy often claimed in STEM fields. In addition to access barriers, stereotype threat and decreased selfefficacy impact the recruitment, academic performance, and retention of both white women and women of Color in STEM programs generally (Anderson et al., 2020;Cadaret et al., 2017) and in engineering specifically (Jones et al., 2013;Ong et al., 2020).
In examining experiences of women of Color in STEM, Ong et al. (2011) explained that being self-confident and feeling empowered despite oppression contributes to the success of women of Color in STEM, but pressure to live up to positive stereotypes contributes to the women's sensitization to gender disparities and negative gender stereotypes. These are the persistent impacts in masculinized fields that situate themselves as identity neutral, but that in reality uphold gender, racial and ethnicity identity-driven differences in who successfully pursues an education and other opportunities in engineering (Charleston et al., 2014;Ong et al., 2020;Pawley, 2019).
As literature has identified, environments in STEM are hostile for women, and gender bias creates psychological distress in women (Carter et al., 2019). Despite this, women in STEM also often deny the presence and impacts of gender bias in their academic environments. For example, both women and men in STEM environments express doubts about the presence of genderbased hostility (Hall, 2016;Riley, 2019). Morris and Daniel (2008) found that women in non-traditional majors, including information technology and engineering, perceived their environments as less chilly than their peers in non-men dominated majors.
As Crosby (1984) suggested, "Denial of personal discrimination" may be how women in these fields cope with their environments. Powell et al. (2009) discussed women's experiences with "gender role conflict, " in which women saw their feminine behavior as potentially beneficial in securing professional opportunities and seeking academic help, even if offered with a patronizing attitude. Their participants identified resistance to gendered hostility as ineffective. This speaks to the ways women position themselves, as they employ strategies ranging from perpetuating, denying, ignoring, or resisting gender hostility.
Being minoritized within the engineering classroom leads women to process and perform their gender in ways that may not be seen or perceived as normative (Faulkner, 2009;Miller et al., 2021;Powell et al., 2009;Starr, 2018). Powell et al. (2009) identified several approaches that women engineering students leveraged to "do" gender (West & Zimmerman, 1987) to signal to their men peers that they belonged in the discipline, including "acting like one of the boys, accepting gender discrimination, achieving a reputation, seeing the advantages over the disadvantages, and adopting an 'anti-woman' approach" (p. 411). These actions may help women gain credibility from men peers, but potentially at the cost of their innate sense of self. Further, this gender performance, enacted solely to gain acceptance from men, ultimately perpetuates an "undoing" of women's gender, implicitly highlighting masculinity as the preference in engineering (Butler, 2004;Powell et al., 2009). Although these strategies may be used to signal that women belong in the discipline, they can undermine women's presence and place in engineering, as they imply that engineering is a masculine endeavor.
The inherently gendered nature of engineering as a field (Secules, 2019), as well as the labor women engage in to perform gender in an attempt to validate their belonging in the discipline, reifies the perception that men are at an advantage in the engineering field (Robinson et al., 2016). This understanding can impact women's behavior and emotions about the field (Cadaret et al., 2017;Diekman, et al., 2010;Faulkner, 2009;Miller et al., 2021;Powell et al., 2009). Psychological distress following experiences of gender bias and hostile classroom climates negatively impact women's sense of belonging (Carter et al., 2019;Chen & Moons, 2015;Murdock-Perriera et al., 2019;Robinson et al., 2016).
Women of Color experience both gendered and racialized forms of oppression due to their intersectional identities and may have vastly different experiences, even from one another based on their particular racial and ethnic backgrounds. As a group, women of Color are forced to manage a multitude of challenges, as they experience racism, micro-and macroaggressions, and accompanying assumptions about academic ability (Ong et al., 2020) along with the gender-related barriers they experience as women. The resulting multifaceted marginalization creates an engineering environment that is fraught for women of Color due to their saliant intersectional social identities (Charleston et al., 2014;Malcom et al., 1976;Ong et al., 2011) that make them both (in)visible and more vulnerable.
Women of Color may attempt to mitigate the harmful consequences of gendered racism by learning the hidden or implicit rules of membership in STEM disciplines to demonstrate their belonging (Ong et al., 2020), avoiding behaviors that could perpetuate stereotypes (e.g., never expressing anger publicly [Charleston et al., 2014]) and minimizing their social identities in attempts to demonstrate their membership in STEM (Johnson et al., 2011;McGee, 2020). While these strategies may help women of Color cope with gendered racism, they perpetuate an expectation of assimilation into the historically white and masculine culture in engineering disciplines. This leaves intact "the anti-inclusive design of STEM education and participation that at its core is structurally racist" (McGee, 2020, p. 634) and will ultimately prevent the recruitment and retention of a racially diverse engineering workforce.
The authors came to this study with varied experiences of womanhood and of performing and resisting the performance of gender. Linda DeAngelo is a white, cisgender woman whose scholarship has focused on understanding structures within higher education that create and reify societal inequities. Danielle Vegas Lewis identifies as a Hispanic and white, cisgender woman who was a first-generation college student. Her scholarship examines the innovative ways in which the underrepresentation of women in STEM might be addressed and improved. Morgen Snowadzky, a student affairs professional and researcher, brought her identities as a white, queer, cisgender woman with a background in gender studies and feminist activism to this work. Linda and Morgen collected the data for this study. Their training and experience in creating inclusive spaces for discussions around gender and race assisted them in facilitating effective interviews with the participants. Still, as white women, they did not share a minoritized racial or ethnic identity with the women of Color participants.
Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) guided this qualitative study. As Smith et al. (2022) detailed, IPA is designed to understand how participants make sense of their major life experiences and focuses on meaning making in a particular context for people who share a particular experience. As we sought to understand how first-year women in engineering experienced and understood their early college experiences, a formative period for students, IPA was an appropriate method. IPA studies engage participants by asking them to recall and discuss their experiences, including past experiences, that are marked by common meaning (Smith et al., 2022). Although IPA focuses on understanding "lived experience" from the perspective of the "experiencing person, " this method is marked as an interpretative endeavor (Bazeley, 2013); participants are asked to make sense of their experiences while the researcher is making sense of their narratives, a double hermeneutic (Smith et al., 2022).
The "avowedly interpretative" nature of IPA differentiates it from other forms of phenomenology which focus more on descriptive accounts of commonalities in lived experience. Instead, IPA, in its idiographic aim, centers on convergence and divergence across participants within its interpretive richly textured analysis (Smith, et al., 2022, p. 145). IPA allowed us to emphasize the role of individuals as intertwined within the wider systemic narrative and to make meaning of how these women came to understand themselves and their environment as engineers. The employment of IPA is consistent with intersectionality tenets focusing on lived experience in individuals and identity salience within systems of power and privilege (Dill & Zambrana, 2009;Jones, 2009;Jones et al., 2022).
The data for this study was collected at a selective research institution in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. The institution has a wellregarded engineering school and, on average, women make up more than 30% of the undergraduate students, a high percentage among engineering schools (National Science Foundation, 2019). However, the percentage of women faculty is below the national average. Just over 15% of the institution's undergraduate student body in engineering are U.S. citizen students of Color, of whom 40% identify as Asian. The engineering school has an active support unit for students of Color that engages in anti-racist practices and an active Society of Women Engineers (SWE) chapter on campus.
The participants in this study are part of a longitudinal study of women engineers' undergraduate experiences. In Fall 2017, the study team sent a recruitment email to all first-year women engineering students at the institution, inviting them to participate in a study about the experiences of women engineering students during their college years. To increase the yield of women of Color in the sample, the study team also sent a follow-up targeted email invitation to the first-year women of Color. In total, 33 selfidentified first-year women engineering students were recruited: 16 women of Color -five Black, five Asian, two Latinx, four Bi/Multiracial -and 17 white women (of whom one is Middle Eastern and experienced herself as a woman of Color and was included in our analysis thusly). Women of Color were overrepresented in the sampling as compared to the population of women of Color in the engineering program. Asian women were included in our study as women of Color as they also face barriers in STEM, "both a bamboo ceiling because of Asian stereotyping and a glass ceiling because of implicit gender bias" (Wu & Jing, 2011, p. 82). Pseudonyms are used in place of names (Table 1).
The data for this study comes from the first interviews with these women, which occurred during the fourth week of their first semester of college. Interviews were conducted in person in a private room in either the engineering building or a building nearby, and each lasted approximately 1 hour. Guided by IPA, we developed a semi-structured interview protocol that was flexible enough to allow participants to share and make meaning about what was important to them in their early experiences (Smith, et al., 2022). The areas covered in the interview were related to how they came to choose to major in engineering; what they experienced both inside and outside of the classroom during their first few weeks on campus; and their expectations about their
Table 1. Participant Demographics Pseudonym Race/Ethnicity Intended Major Aidia White (Middle Eastern) Undecided Alexandra Latinx Electrical Angela White Bioengineering Anna Asian Undecided Brianna Latinx Bioengineering Britney White Undecided Cassandra White Mechanical Charlotte White Chemical Chloe White Civil or Mechanical Elizabeth White Bioengineering Emma Asian Mechanical Faith Asian Chemical Genika Black Bioengineering Ginger White Material Grace Asian Bioengineering Hailey White Bioengineering Hannah Bi/Multiracial Industrial Jordan White Civil or Environmental Julia Asian Undecided Justice Black Bioengineering Katherine White Bioengineering Lucy Bi/Multiracial Chemical Mia White Chemical Michelle Bi/Multiracial Undecided Monica Black Mechanical Nasha Black Undecided Nicole Black Bioengineering Paige White Industrial Pheobe White Electrical Samantha White Undecided Shreya Bi/Multiracial Undecided Sophia White Mechanical Taylor White Industrial first college year and future experiences in engineering, both during and after college. Examples of specific questions asked of participants included: "When you think about who becomes an engineer, what are the things that come to mind?" "How does people's race or appearance have anything to do with the way that they show up in class or they interact with other people in class?" "Tell me about what kinds of challenges you anticipate encountering as an engineering student?" and "Do you think your identity as a woman is relevant to your success in engineering?"
The Review of Higher Education 202X
When asking about their identity in relation to others, we asked participants explicitly about their interactions with white men, the majority group in the engineering spaces. When asking questions about their gender as women, we asked the women of Color to discuss if and how they thought their identities as Black, Asian, Latinx, or Bi/Multiracial women was relevant to their success in engineering, both as undergraduates and later in their careers. 4We also asked women of Color to reflect on their racial or ethnic identities at various points in the interview or as follow-up to their responses to other questions when illumination for deeper understanding was needed. The women of Color only addressed their own race or ethnicity when prompted and white women did not bring up their own race or ethnicity within their responses and only addressed race in relation to their observations or interactions with white men.
Most participants were enrolled in the same courses, meeting first-year engineering requirements, although a few were in an honors version of one of these courses and some had placed out of a course due to an AP credit. This shared coursework and classroom environment established foundational continuity among our participants' experiences, which were then differentiated by how they understood their own experiences in relation to their identities.
We began our systematic analysis in a case-by-case manner (Smith et al., 2022). The first and third authors each read and reread the set of interview transcripts, fully immersing themselves in the data. Throughout this process, both authors generated preliminary exploratory notes and codes with a particular focus on the meaning participants ascribed to interactions, behaviors, and experiences. Next, they identified patterns through a process of clustering pieces of data with connections. Then, they jointly reviewed their interpretations of the data to identify what IPA refers to as personal experiential themes (Smith et al., 2022). This process was completed first across all the transcripts to deeply saturate the phenomenon and then repeated separately for white women and women of Color to understand their unique lived experiences.
Through ongoing conversations, the first and third authors discussed the personal experiential themes and refined them as they considered the women's development of self-identity within their environment and how this resulted in a double bind as this concept had emerged across the coding. They also engaged in peer debriefing during this stage with engineering educators who worked to support the women of Color on this campus about their developing themes and their double-bound nature. Through this process these authors created larger group experiential themes (Smith et al., 2022), committing to a central element of IPA that privileges the "lived experience of the group. " At this stage, the first and third authors reviewed quotes within the larger context of the transcripts, then finalized the themes and how they mapped on to the quotes and their surrounding context in the transcripts. This rereading provided more information as they developed a set of more granular and grounded findings.
The second author joined the first author's research team after themes had been generated and an early draft of the manuscript written. However, she completed her own analysis to familiarize herself with the data and ensure that the themes identified by the rest of the research team and their representation in the early manuscript aligned with her analyses and interpretations. As a member of the research team, she contributed to the further development and final writing of the manuscript. Initially, Butler (1997;Butler & Athanasiou, 2013) and Ahmed (2007) were used to frame this work but bringing these two feminist theorists, one focused on gender and one on race, into conversation with the data and with the organizing vernacular of the double bind proved wanting and the author team moved away from these theorizations for this article.
In the final stages of writing the manuscript we brought intersectionality into the framing to understand the experiences participants shared. This framing was particularly important in unpacking the nuances shared by the women of Color. This turn in framing called us to make explicit in our interpretations and final writing the implicit intersectional nature of what our participants shared, even if the participants themselves did not make the connections (Bowleg, 2008).
At the time of the interviews, in the fourth week of college, these women were processing both the current reality of their engineering classrooms and other engineering spaces, as well as narratives they brought with them about engineering and their future as engineers. They were keenly aware of the underrepresentation of their identitiesfoot_4 (gender or gender and race or ethnicity) within engineering. When asked to describe who becomes an engineer, they almost exclusively described white men as the holders of engineering identities.
As a group, these women's individual early experiences, observations, and insights painted a picture of an environment that locked them in a double bind between feeling confident, questioning their competence, and having their competence questioned, between fulfilling expectations for what it is to be an engineer and pushing to expand the construction of an engineer identity. These interviews revealed that, regardless of race or ethnicity, these women brought the context of the double bind with them to college, and it played a role in their early processing and creation of what it was to be an engineer within an environment in which their identities were historically excluded. For women of Color, the whiteness of the space uniquely differentiated and situated their meaning making in relation to their experiences. To represent this, we present our findings across four areas: anticipating the double bind when entering the field, processing engineering spaces through the filter of the double bind, holding the weight of (in)visibility as a woman of Color, and counteracting the double bind with subversive authenticity and optimism.
Tension was often evident to the women in others' comments about their acceptance into engineering or their anticipated ease in starting an engineering career. Most perceived that being underrepresented (as white women or women of Color) would be beneficial to their careers due to efforts to diversify the field. Yet they also anticipated challenges within school or work relationships related to their identities, which presented some dissonance. Responses they received from others regarding their decision to pursue engineering ranged from comments about how novel the choice was, to how challenging engineering would be for them, to their likely career success in engineering due to their underrepresented identity. For example, Julia, an Asian woman, shared that when she told her aunt that she planned to pursue engineering, her aunt responded, "Oh, that's really good because you're a minority and then . . .you will just get hired right away and you're a woman too so you're an extra minority. " Jordan, a white woman, recounted her family telling her it would be easier for her to enter engineering because she was a woman. Jordan saw these comments as inherently gendered but reacted with humor: "Well, in the moment I laughed them off. I was like, they're just joking with me, but if they're saying this there's probably some truth. " Participants struggled, as Jordan did here, to trust that they "merit[ed]" being in engineering while simultaneously worrying that gender or gender and racial or ethnic bias would negatively impact their professional success. This double bind was a trend in how many of the women processed their experiences of genderism 6 and gendered racism, which they were aware of and acknowledged in the interviews but also wanted to actively resist and minimize.
Across the diverse identities among our participants, many of the women indicated that they were already struggling academically in at least one of their courses in their first semester, due to adjusting to teaching styles, new content, or developing different study skills. However, the women painted the classroom as a neutral space, where all students were struggling with challenging content regardless of identity, which contrasted with the comments they heard from others about women having it easier in engineering. Representing this double bound conundrum, Chloe, a white woman, discussed her perception of schools and companies trying to increase representation of women through admissions and hiring:
That means that if I am a woman, I have a higher chance of getting in [to engineering in college] because they want to spike their numbers. . . . But then once you're in the actual company it's no longer, "Oh, you're a female so we have to treat you pretty or special. " It's kind of, like, "Okay, here's a job. Get it done. If you don't get it done, it's because you're a woman. "
Like others, Chloe believed her identity might benefit her in entering opportunities due to pressures to diversify engineering, but in this, she anticipated that her identity as a woman would quickly become a burden if she did not perform at the highest level. This conundrum was repeated in the women's beliefs about what was expected of them in their academic performance.
The women of Color were more explicit in their acknowledgement of differences in the way that gendered racism positioned the standards that were expected from them in engineering than white women. Although they focused on gender in talking about these differences in expectations, these women were experiencing their gender and race simultaneously (West & Fenstermaker, 1995), but in discussions related to expectations, it was their gender that was primed. The explicitness of their discussions as contrasted with what the white women participants shared reflects the intersectional oppression the women of Color experienced. Anna, an Asian woman, described the input she had collected from other engineering students about what challenges they faced. She indicated that she observed stark differences in the way women and men were expected to earn positions: Nobody has explicitly said, "You are going to have a harder time getting a job because you're a woman. " . . . Like, the girls will always say, "Oh, you can win an employer over with your personality, " and the guys will be more like, "Focus on your classes and do well, " because you don't have to worry as much about your personality if you're a guy. This quote indicates that Anna understood that for women the pursuit of employment is about more than what she described as merit. Aidia, a Middle
The Review of Higher Education 202X Eastern woman, described her internal questioning prompted by the systems in place to increase diversity and how she then might doubt her own merit:
If I'm ever hired into a company I'll think, "Was I only hired ' cause I'm a woman? . . . I think that'll make me feel like I constantly need to prove myself and I'm representing everybody, and that might ruin me.
Later in the interview, Aidia shared: "I think anybody who comes from a minority, they understand that they're gonna be judged and everybody's gonna judge their group of people according to how they act. " Aidia anticipated self-doubt, like the double bind, as a possibility related to the fear of underperformance or vulnerability as confirmation of the dominant narrative about minoritized people in engineering being underqualified. This reflection on the burden of representation gets at a key concept of stereotype threat (Inzlicht & Schmader, 2011), represented here in how the women of Color felt about their presence in the field -that they as individuals must perform in a ways that exceed expectations, or they would lose not only as individuals but as a whole group. Hannah, a biracial woman, added to this concern about backlash against women being in the field as she had heard about her dad's coworkers being resentful about a push to hire and promote women at his engineering consulting firm. Hannah saw this as something that varied between companies, and others similarly discussed finding the "right" company. Some of the women of Color saw their individual careers as potentially being impacted by bias in the workplace, but also saw their identity as an advantage which indicated a degree of acceptance of these circumstances. Their reflections revealed a sort of bargaining between being confident in their ability to succeed and discounting their own merit due to the push to diversify the field. The compromise that emerged for many was spinning their potential to resist as a strength, as Alexandra, a Latinx woman described: So [people higher up] might look down on me, especially as just women coming into the field, but I'm hoping it's not a problem, but it might be…. I guess I just have to do the best work that I can do and just not really let it affect me. Definitely being self-aware and having self-confidence to overcome that and not let what they say or how they treat me [affect it] will definitely be a big part of it, I think.
Alexandra expected to have her competence questioned by her superiors and was preparing herself to resist this potentially negative environment by cultivating an internal affirming dialogue. These oppositional narratives, which are sometimes referred to as counter-storytelling (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002), are enacted as resistance to the gendered racism women of Color anticipate within engineering.
The engineering program, including classrooms, resources, and cocurricular activities, also set the stage for what all our participants expected for their futures as engineers, particularly in the hyper masculinized and white engineering culture (Carter et al., 2019;Cheryan et al., 2017;McGee, 2020;Miller et al., 2021;Pawley, 2019). Within our interviews, this route of questioning about these women's experiences in engineering during their first few weeks of college proved to be the space where white women could access their differential racialized experience as white women engineers. In response to questions about how students generally interact with professors and teaching assistants, women of all races and ethnicities said they saw no differences by race or gender, but they did note differences in the behavior of white men in their classes and other engineering spaces.
However, the women often contrasted their own self-awareness of their talents and ability to succeed with the visible confidence of the white men. Michelle, a biracial woman, for example, said that she often saw white men on their phones during class and saw this as an indication that they "just get it. " This served as a visible signal to her that white men were more confident in their abilities and did not need to look like they were trying. Similarly, Britney, a white woman who talked about her comfort in majority-white men spaces and reluctantly identified as above average, discussed how women are taught not to talk about their accomplishments "straight out. " She said, "I think guys are okay with being, oh yeah, I'm above average, when they're really not. . . . Maybe they are, but you definitely get a vibe [that they know what they are doing] from some of them right away. " This "vibe" was part of what the women picked up on from the white men in their classes that caused them to consider their own competence as less than that of white men. Women noticed white men in the classroom giving off this very confident "vibe, " such as by asking more questions and interrupting or challenging the professor during lecture.
Most of these women discussed deferring to office hours or woman-towoman study groups, as opposed to classroom questions and groups, as spaces where they could acknowledge feeling challenged or uncertain about course content. Britney, a white woman, explained her comfort around and preference to work with women: "Sometimes with girls I feel more comfortable . . . but with guys I feel little less comfortable not knowing things or like saying dumb stuff. . . . I always have that fear, so I talk less in study groups. " This codified the limited visibility of women's competence in the classroom. This limited visibility aligned with what the women observed as white men's habit of looking to other white men for answers and support. Elizabeth, a white woman, described white men's bias toward asking other white men for help when questions arose: I think occasionally, guys assume that they're going to be a level above you, and they'll talk down to you a little bit at first. Then you prove yourself and they're like, "Oh, okay. She's right here with me. " Or sometimes, "She's above me. " They very rarely ask the girls for help first. They'll usually go to the other guys in the room for help. Then when all of them are really confused and you turn around and you're like, "I can help you, " they're like, "Oh. "
As Elizabeth described, the white men started by assuming that women would not know answers and affirmed other white men's position as knowledge holders. Women who held this knowledge were thus seen as an exception to the bedrock assumption that competence was inherently white and masculine. Michelle, a biracial woman, observed ways that white men demonstrated their competence when she was working with them in a study group: I feel like sometimes when we're working together...I get a little bit shot down... I'll say an idea, and it's not a dumb idea. It's a good idea, and [the white men will] just kind of push it off to the side and keep going with their ideas.
Michelle knew her ideas were good but felt limited by the white men's commitment to their own ideas over hers. White men positioned themselves as experts in their interactions with women, denying them space to be participants in group work or in the classroom, and the women felt caught by the need to prove themselves as qualified before engaging effectively in these settings.
However, asking questions and being more visible participants in the classroom came with anticipated consequences. The explicitness of the gender divide through the performance of questions created a tension between the women doubting their own confidence and contrasting indications of effort. Almost all study participants recognized a clear difference in the number of women who asked questions in class. Briana, a Latinx woman, explained how the white men in her physics class went out of their way to ask more questions and challenge the professor more than women. She stated:
They [white men] think they know all. And sometimes whenever they're wrong, they, like, still try to repeat that they're right. . . . They [White men] are always asking questions. But so, those questions are to prove that the professor did something wrong.
Bethany, a white woman, elaborated on this and explained that she believed white men to be performing their intellect through asking more questions than women during class, stating "I think they [white men] kind of just like showing off . . . [demonstrating] how smart they sound when they ask complicated questions. " Paige, a white woman, talked about her awareness of stereotypes regarding women's lack of math and science skills, but she also said, "You know it's [stereotypes are] not true and you can like differentiate it but [the stereotypes are] still there. " Paige indicated a tension between her evident capacity to do engineering coursework and an internalized narrative about women's incompetence, which hung over her efforts to act in a way that defied gendered expectations. Participants took in men's performances of their gender (i.e., hegemonic white masculinity) in ways that silenced their own competence, even in the face of countervailing narratives and performance, demonstrating the insidiousness of representational intersectionality in the double bind and how it functions as oppression.
The women of Color seemed particularly aware of who was entitled to space and struggle in engineering. The stories they told underscored this hyperawareness. They shared the observations of the white women in terms of their perceptions of men's, and white men's in particular, confidence and comfort within engineering spaces. However, unlike white women, the double bind led them to want to preserve their invisibility to avoid judgements and to feel they needed to be more visible and take up space to counteract white men's dominance of the classroom. Women like Monica, a Black woman, pointed out how white men didn't seem to anticipate negative consequences when struggling in a public and visible way. She recounted how she had watched white men in groups laugh and joke loudly together during classes in which they did not understand the content, whereas in her experience, women tended to "ask their neighbor quietly" for assistance. Monica then went on to describe her concerns as a Black woman about being more visible when she was confused in class. She expressed concerns that people would think she "just doesn't get it, " and how she asked trusted friends instead of admitting to the difficulty of the content in a public manner, as she observed the white men doing. Even as a first-year student, Monica did not feel she could acknowledge she had not already grasped the content in her engineering classes. The women of Color saw being "quiet" as a mechanism that might make them safe from such exposure, something white women did not reference in describing their decisions about how they were engaging in the space, demonstrating structural intersectionality. Thus, Monica's behavior, and the similar behavior of hiding their gaps in understanding through leaning on other women described by other women of Color, reveals a painful awareness of the entitlement to the engineering space embraced by the white men in the class, including the privilege to visibly struggle. This phenomenon of "around whiteness" as described by Ahmed (2007) cast the general engineering space as inherently white and thus restrictive for the women of Color.
This bind of visibility also extended to engineering opportunities outside of the classroom. Participants described skill-based communities such as a computer programming club and engineering design teams as particularly men-dominated where there were often even fewer women to rely on for support in these spaces than in the classroom. Anna, an Asian woman, talked about her experience trying to join a design team, which had only a few women members out of 60 participants:
They have a room in [the Engineering Building] and when you go in there, it's just all guys. . . . It feels like I have to do extra work to show that I'm there. And then there would be a guy with the same amount of experience as me, and they'll [the other men students] just kind of vibe more with him.
Anna described men's preferences to work with other men, which resulted in her feeling invisible even as she was more visible as a woman, and an Asian woman in particular, within the space. This experience echoed what the other women described as their experiences in the classroom on group projects or other collaborations during class. Although many of the women across race and ethnicity differences described the tendency of students to group together based on gender in the classroom such that most of the class project teams and study groups were single gender, women of Color seemed to have a heightened awareness of this experience. Some of the women went into depth in describing their experiences in these men-dominated spaces, as Anna did.
Despite efforts to interact with men peers in engineering contexts, women, and particularly women of Color, found that men ignored women's connection-seeking behaviors, avoided conversing, physically positioned themselves away from women, or openly prioritized connections with other men. This double bind of invisibility while being hypervisible (Newton, 2023) resulted in feelings of pressure to perform at a higher level due to intersecting identities. For example, Genika, a Black woman, described this stress, stating: I feel like I relate to women because we're women and we know that sometimes the men look at us like we're not that smart. And sometimes, the other side, it's just like, oh, I have to prove myself because I'm Black. Like it's a different ballgame. Sometimes it's like because I'm female I have to work harder, but because I'm Black I have to work even twice as hard.
Genika went on to describe how she code-switched in the classroom, adjusting her tone and behavior in order to not be seen as "angry, " "ratchet, " or "ghetto. " Genika's narrative about self-policing illustrates the self-awareness of these women in their early undergraduate careers, and the pressure to live up to higher standards because the white men looked at them as if they were "not smart. " The representational intersectionality in this example of gendered racism in what Genika described is also represented by Briana, a Latinx woman. She expressed a similar awareness of "being minority females" as something women of Color all go through and linked it to her own experiences with depression and anxiety before she arrived in the collegiate environment. Briana said:
Maybe I might look confident on the outside, but I'm also like suffering on the inside. . . . [women of Color] might get sad about it and some other-and like interactions might happen with other males or like other [white] females and they might get stressed about it and they have a lot of academic work together, so they might end up like I was last year. They might end up being really depressed or anxious about things.
Briana revealed the impact of interactions that made women of Color feel noticed for their race and gender that become a source of stress. The women of Color described how their interaction with, and perceptions of, white men impacted their well-being, whereas the white women did not describe such a heightened response. Briana also emphasized the importance of finding others with similar experiences to her own as a woman of Color to ensure she felt supported. She framed this community building as a coping mechanism for her mental health. She described these connections as essential to her success: "So, I think that's the only way that you can get through the struggle: by knowing people who are just like you who are going through the same struggle together. "
This feeling of togetherness almost exclusively came up for Black and Latinx women in reference to their participation in an academic program for underrepresented students that connects some students entering their institution as early as the summer before their first semester. Nasha, a Black woman, had largely made her decision to attend the institution based on an alumna woman of Color telling her it was "like an ongoing family thing. " Justice, another Black woman, contrasted the affirmative nature of the space with the way the School of Engineering seemed to put little effort into the needs of students like herself: "[The School of Engineering] says, 'Have at it. ' And that's it. They don't really accommodate for the fact that it could be an issue that women are underrepresented, or people of Color are underrepresented. "
These points about the availability of affirming identity-based community support emphasized that the women of Color were looking to the institution to provide indicators of belonging, but they rarely found them, and some did not identify any. For example, Michelle indicated that the isolation associated with being in the gender and racial minority was exacerbated due to her biracial identity, which resulted in not feeling included in either the white or Asian communities. She stated:
Well, since I'm half Vietnamese and half white, and my mom, she didn't really carry her culture to us. . . . Like she didn't teach me the language, me and my brothers. I wish she did, but it's okay. So, I feel like it was harder for me to fit in because I could never really click with the Asians because they all knew Asian stuff. But I could never really click with the white people because I was half-Asian, so I was a little bit different in that aspect. And they all kinda group together. Sometimes I felt like I was in the middle or alone.
These stories demonstrate the harmful consequences of not addressing gendered racism for women of Color in engineering.
Some women framed being a woman as a privilege, not only in the hiring process, but in projecting feminine attributes as assets in the field. When asked to describe a typical engineer, most women across races and ethnicities classified typical engineers as older white men who worked in cubicles and on computers. This contrasted with their descriptions of their own social strengths, which they saw as beneficial to solving problems and working in groups with men. Angela, a white woman, indicated that she saw her ability to make unique contributions as tied to her identity. She said in discussing women's contributions: I think on the girls' side of it . . . there's a wide range [of skills], which is also good in engineering, because then you get a perspective from people who all think differently. So, then you can use those different aspects to solve problems and things like that.
Angela's comments echo common arguments for diversity that frame perspectives not brought by white men as beneficial to problem solving.
As opposed to feeling held back by a need to conform to the masculinized engineering stereotype, some women demonstrated their agency by making intentional choices to remain true to themselves while pursuing engineering. This included women who were taking electives in passion areas like creative writing or who participated in cocurricular activities like band. SWE was often mentioned as a supportive space that allowed participants to see more women represented and to feel supported. Shreya, a Biracial woman, was one of several who mentioned a Pinterest-based event that SWE hosted. Shreya valued that SWE created space for her to connect with other women engineers over a topic other than engineering. She articulated that this supported her "hope to keep a lot of my identity that doesn't, that's not relevant to engineering. " She said her brother criticized these events as not being indicative of the seriousness necessary for engineers, but that she valued that "[SWE is] not trying to change the stereotype of what it means to be a woman. They're trying to change what it means to be an engineer. " These actions by a group defined by the participation of women are reconstructing the norms and expectations for women. Shreya and other women in this group subverted the dominant narrative by embracing feminized activities in the interest of authenticity and progress. This disruption of what it is to be an engineer is an example of counter-storytelling (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002).
Indeed, many women said that a changing political atmosphere and social norms had created a generally positive atmosphere for engineering students of their race and/or gender. Justice, a Black woman, said that being a woman would be an asset since "it opens more doors because I feel like the world is shifting. " This trust in the future of engineering was echoed by women across race and ethnicities, who seemed to trust that things would be better as they arrived in the field, even though, for example, a memo in which a white man who worked at Google criticized the company for its intentional inclusion of women had recently made headlines nationwide. Britney, a white woman, articulated a belief that although there might be hostile companies, there were also organizations that specifically wanted women. She noted that her social circle echoed this optimism, stating: "Mostly my friends try to stay positive. . . . We're like, we need more women both in science ' cause of science and also just to make sure there's a better environment for them, for future women. "
Motivation to contribute to the visibility of women succeeding, such as "leading by example, " was an important way the women demonstrated agency in response to oppression, especially the women of Color. Black women, like Justice, were aware of their intersecting identities as impacting their experience of difference in engineering spaces, but also in their potential to make unique contributions to their community. Justice described her pursuit of an engineering degree as "bigger than I am" and imagined younger Black girls looking up to her, which empowered her to pursue the field and contribute to changing the face of engineering. This focus on visibility was a way that the women of Color worked to disrupt hegemonic masculinity and whiteness, in contrast with the concerns they had about being visible within the engineering space. The women of Color knew they must be visible to model for others in the future, while understanding the risks of visibility in their current experience.
This study advances understanding of what undergraduate women engineers experience early in their college careers, an area that has received little attention. We find that women in engineering realize in just the first few weeks that they are on campus that it is in their interest to make decisions based on antithetical double bound perceptions about women's abilities to succeed in engineering (Eagly & Carli, 2007;Phelan et al., 2008). This foretells a complicated journey through engineering in which they are at a much greater risk of attrition from the field, even with comparable achievement (Lord et al., 2014) and less likely than men to enter the engineering profession, even if they do earn an engineering degree (Fouad et al., 2017;Ong et al., 2020;Ross et al., 2021). Findings demonstrate that women of all races and ethnicities experience a double bind that begins before college, often when they discuss their choice to pursue engineering that continues and is reified in their early college experiences. These experiences leave them questioning their competence and suitability for engineering as they navigate a hypermasculine engineering environment steeped in whiteness (Carter et al., 2019;Cheryan et al., 2017;McGee, 2020;Miller et al., 2021;Pawley, 2019) that neither recognizes them as knowledge holders nor grants them space to bring in the fullness of their identities.
Because the double bind is inherently contradictory, it makes it impossible for women to escape the oppression that constrains them as less than optimal engineers. This is in part because the double bind demands that they "be enough but not too much" (Faulkner, 2009). In addressing these issues, space needs to be created that explicitly promotes belonging and recognizes the competence of women of all races and ethnicities within their chosen disciplines to counteract messaging that they are unworthy or out of place (Murdock-Perriera et al., 2019;Robinson et al., 2016).
With their intersectionally minoritized identities and experiences of gendered racism, the women of Color in the sample were best able to give voice to the perniciousness of this double bound hegemonic engineering environment. What they shared of their experiences went beyond what the white women discussed or were able to articulate with respect to genderism. However, the white women, in explaining how they understood white men, seemed to be able to access their differential whiteness and how it positioned them as white women in the space of engineering. In this, our findings add to the work of Miller et al. (2021) on gender and Johnson et al. (2011) and Mc-Gee's (2020) scholarship on race and gender, in that these results underscore the hypermasculine and white normative culture of engineering that women of all races and ethnicities must contend with as they seek membership in their chosen discipline. Negotiating their place in engineering early in their undergraduate careers is critical for women as Woosley (2003), Clark (2005), and Allen et al. (2008) have demonstrated how early initial experiences affect later experiences and can result in negative outcomes.
Framing this study intersectionally and focusing on representational and structural intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) allowed us to unpack and make meaning in new ways of the experiences that these women shared. The presence of representational intersectionality in the way women monitored themselves to avoid confirming stereotypes about women's skills and intelligence as it relates to engineering is an especially profound illustration of the double bind. Regardless of whether the ways in which women's performance of gender and race challenges or upholds stereotypes (in attempting to demonstrate belonging), either approach to enacting or undoing gender can harm women's identity as engineers, especially based on how the majority receives and processes such actions (Powell et al., 2009;West & Zimmerman, 1987). As Murdock-Perriera et al. ( 2019) argued, self-policing reifies the notion that it is necessary for women to hold the weight of being a visible disruption. For women of Color, this experience is amplified (Ong et al., 2011;Robinson et al., 2016), affecting how, why, and when women of Color choose to enact or suppress these identities. The conundrum of the double bind present in these women's performance of their gender or gender and race or ethnicity in relation to effort reduces the visibility of their competence and likely leads to other women mirroring similar self-monitoring behaviors that hide both their struggles and successes. This makes it even more difficult for them to build an affirming engineering identity (Starr, 2018).
Focusing on structural intersectionality allowed us to uncover the unique experiences of women of Color and their heightened understanding and response to their experiences and positionality within the engineering environment. Due to intersectional oppression, the women of Color were much more direct about not only the harm they experienced, but how that harm positioned their possible response in ways that were not always positive (McGee, 2020;Turk-Bicakci & Berger, 2014). One result of this in our study was that the women sought safety, often through invisibility, yet were hypervisible in the space (Newton, 2023) and understood the importance of visibility in widening the pathway for future women of Color to enter and succeed in engineering. This was not a concern for the white women.
Leaning into intersectionality, and specifically into representational intersectionality, also illuminated the ways in which the white women experienced themselves as non-normatively white and the consequence of this early on for them as they developed as engineers. In this, we advance work with intersectionality that Goodman (2014) highlighted on the power of intersectional approaches to understanding the ways that oppression manifests for those with both privileged and minoritized identities. Although white women can lean into their whiteness and therefore the power and protection it offers (Faber & Williams, 2023), in doing so they reify their underrepresentation in the field and how the white hegemonic norms of engineering limit how they interact and imagine who they can become.
We also found that some women from different races and ethnicities addressed their agency by engaging authentically with the fullness of their identities in actions and activities considered outside of the normative in engineering. This disruption to what it means to be an engineer creates counter storytelling narratives (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) intended to upend the ways that the double bind positions women engineers. In this, we extend earlier work by Powell et al. (2009) on the advantages and disadvantages women of all races and ethnicities face in engineering.
However, this rosy picture of women's contributions to the field, as well as perceptions that being a white woman or woman of Color is actually an advantage in engineering, may serve as an optimistic projection that contradicts indicators that women of all races and ethnicities are not succeeding at the same rate as their men peers (American Society for Engineering Education, 2016;Lord et al., 2014). This notion creates potential harm to individuals by disregarding personal discrimination and systematic bias, with white women more likely internalizing and individualizing barriers and taking them up as earned meritocratic outcomes (DeAngelo et al., 2024). This impacts these women's ability to advocate for themselves (Crosby, 1984) and empathize with the struggles of other women (Hall, 2016). In how white women uptake a meritocratic, individualistic approach in response to their double bound experiences this normalizes and preserves the historic hegemonic culture that Carter et al. (2019) described.
Intersectionality was a valuable lens for accessing the potency of the double bind for women of all races and ethnicities. Future studies designed to understand how oppression manifests in STEM and engineering should consider intersectionality, despite the difficulty in enacting this framework (Jones et al., 2022;Museus & Saelua, 2014). Engaging with it here enhanced our understanding of how women of Color and white women process the white hegemony of engineering spaces in ways that both converge with and diverge from one another, as well as from the normative culture enacted by white men. Future studies in higher education could build on the foundation set out in this study and specifically should interrogate the effects of women laboring under and holding the weight of being a visible disruption and counteracting the double bind with subversive authenticity and optimism. Research that further examines these phenomena and consequences of engaging in these somewhat contradictory experiences will have significant and positive implications for women in engineering and in STEM generally.
Although we oversampled women of Color, this study was not designed to deeply saturate their experiences or to disentangle their distinct racial and ethnic experiences. Still, in using intersectionality, we were able to position the uniqueness of their lived experiences as bounded within the purposes of this study. Future work is needed to deepen understanding of this phenomenon of the double bind that is specifically present for women of Color, including work on specific racial and ethnic groups, aimed at interrupting this cycle of oppression. Additional work also needs to engage more broadly in examining the impacts of the whiteness of the engineering space for both people of Color and white women. Our ability to contribute to this area focused only on how women of all races and ethnicities perceive white men students in the classroom and thus is not as expansive as is needed.
Lastly, future scholarship should address how the ways in which white men perform confidence in the classroom shapes how people of all races, [132.174.255.116] Project MUSE (2025-05-16 20:51 GMT) University of Pittsburgh genders, and ethnicities engage in the space. As few studies have examined undergraduate men's confidence in STEM or engineering (for exceptions, see Chachra & Kilgore, 2009;Dahl, 2018;Litzler et al., 2014), additional research is needed on the ways that the masculine nature of these disciplines may harm undergraduate men, such as those who do not conform to masculine ideals. Previous scholarship has demonstrated how toxic masculinity negatively impacts men's mental health, confidence, and overall quality of life (Sexton, 2019); as such, additional research should examine how the culture of engineering specifically may harm undergraduate men pursuing degrees and careers in this field.
Although engineering and STEM subscribes to and presents itself as an "identity-blind" and meritocratic space, it simply is not (Blair-Loy & Cech, 2022;Carter et al., 2019). As efforts to diversify engineering continue, explicitly naming the ways in which these academic environments are inequitable is essential in attempts to shift culture in ways that allow students with minoritized identities to feel that they belong. Failing to do so early in the undergraduate careers of white women and women of Color in engineering can have especially damaging consequences. Research has demonstrated just how influential and important early experiences are in relation to student success outcomes (Allen et al., 2008;Clark, 2005;Woosley, 2003). Although women students in engineering contexts may uniquely experience these harmful behaviors, results from this study may inform the ways in which students more broadly are supported within all disciplines and generally, institutions of higher education. Engaging with the findings and implications of this study can help ameliorate the consequences of the double bind that women of all races and ethnicities are unnecessarily and unfairly forced to navigate. Woosley, S. A. (2003). How important are the first few weeks of college? The longterm effects of initial college experiences. College Student Journal, 37(2), 201. Wu, L., & Jing, W. (2011). Asian women in STEM careers: An invisible minority in a double bind. Issues in Science and Technology, 28(1), 82-87.
Black feminism has a long history dating back to slavery of challenging the pernicious manifestations of oppression that are particular to the nexus of race and gender(Collins, 2009; 2022).
TheMerriam-Webster (n.d.) dictionary defines double bind as "a psychological predicament in which a person receives from a single source conflicting messages that allow no appropriate response to be made" (e.g., "a parent may respond negatively when his or her child approaches or attempts to engage in affectionate behavior but then, when the child turns away or tries to leave, reaches out to encourage the child to return" [APA Dictionary of Psychology, n.d.]).
[132.174.255.116] Project MUSE (2025-05-16 20:51 GMT) University of Pittsburgh
We choose not to ask white women to reflect specifically on their racial identities in lines of questioning related to their gender to avoid centering whiteness.
The term underrepresentation/underrepresented is used here to describe the experience of these women regarding their numerical representation in engineering. This term will be used in association with an integral support program in the engineering department that serves racially minoritized students. We will also use the term minoritized, which more specifically speaks to the experience of those impacted by power systems and behaviors that create minorities from numerical underrepresentation.
We utilize the term genderism rather than sexism, which may be more colloquially used, to refer to the systematic differential treatment of men and women based on their gender including gender bias. We did not discuss sexual identity with the participants, and thus focus on how their experiences were tied to gender.